I know why he responds, little man's syndrome, vindictiveness, blah blha, but its really unnecessary to answer every charge. Likewise the legit bloggers and journalists shouldn't give the guy more of a forum by acting like childern in response. Total lack of professionalism on this POS social media.

"When a man with money meets a man with experience, the man with experience leaves with money and the man with money leaves with experience."

Simmons is blasting Gilbert in tweets, Gilbert is blasting Simmons back in tweets, the agents are promising puppies and rainbows if the union de-certs, Woj is rocking to himself in a corner thinking Billy Hunter and the big market owners will ride to the rescue...

Eh, fuck it. I've got CFB 'til January, then college basketball 'til March, and then its the next season of Actaball. Wake me when they remember us fans again.

"The fucking Who...... If I want to watch old people run around ill go set fire to a nursing home." - CDT

I sure hope they resolve this. What am I going to do with my winter if I don't have a 20 win basketball team to watch for the next 5 years? The overall NBA product is actually really good right now but as far as my local egocentric view is concerned, all I want is carnage.

"Well then I guess there's only one thing left to do...win the whole, f***in', thing."- Jake Taylor

sportsguy33 Bill Simmons 7 And on the other side, you have the 5 best agents trying to pull a fast one on Billy Hunter and bump him out. What an f-ing mess. The end.23 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons 6 NBA lockout has owners like Dolan, Gilbert, Sarver and Taylor prominently involved. Look how they run their real teams. I have no hope.23 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons 5 NFL lockout was led by Kraft, Jones + Richardson, 3 of the shrewdest and most ruthless businessman we have as sports owners.23 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons 4 None of the newer owners who overpaid for teams should have any real say in this lockout. It's not our fault they made dumb purchases.23 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons 3 Gilbert also overpaid for his team, overpaid players FOR YEARS and would love the current system had LBJ stayed. Now it's no good for him?23 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons 2 Sarver overpaid for team, spent last few years slicing $$$$ and turned Suns fans against him. Not he wants to blow up the system? Go away.23 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons 1 Keep hearing Gilbert/Sarver are hurting NBA lockout progress from owner's side. This pisses me off for a variety of reasons, but mainly...23 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons Check out @mysecondempire 's piece on NHL enforcers: http://tinyurl.com/64knu3l PS: I wrote for Grantland's YouTube HOF 2day: http://es.pn/nLEtDB14 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons Last thing: NBA needs to take responsibility for its failing markets. Hard cap/rev sharing are bandaids not fixes for "too many teams" prob.14 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons Diff between NBA lockout and NFL lockout: fans would have flipped out if we even missed ONE week of football. Not true for hoops. At all.14 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons Just split the rev 50/50, 4-year max deals, and players have to bend on a harder cap and we're 90% there! This pisses me off to no end.14 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons BTW - I am not on owners' side, they have taken no blame whatsoever for the dozens of TERRIBLE deals they gave out. I hate everyone in this.14 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons This feels like the '06 Writer's Strike all over again. NBA players are going to lose paychecks to get a worse deal then they'd get now.14 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons Shit, even seasonticket holders don't really care - you think I'm going to be pissed that I get refunded for 2 mths of Clips tickets?14 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons NBA owners certainly don't care about losing Oct/Nov/Dec: they save 2 mths of costs and make you lose a few paychecks for leverage.14 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply » sportsguy33 Bill Simmons Note to NBA players: Nobody except diehard junkies will care that the NBA isn't around in Oct/Nov/Dec. Everyone will be watching football.

"It's like dating a woman who hates you so much she will never break up with you, even if you burn down the house every single autumn." ~ Chuck Klosterman on Browns fans relationship with the Browns

If I showed this line to Colts fans six weeks ago and said, "This will be the line for your Week 2 game against the Browns," they would have asked things like, "Are the Browns about to trade a 2012 third-round pick for Michael Vick, LeSean McCoy and DeSean Jackson?" and "Is our team plane about to crash?" Speaking of catastrophes, I'm launching a new segment in the NFL picks column this season: the NBA Lockout Watch, sponsored by Anusol. That's right, Anusol, the cream you should buy for your itchy anus. If you're clawing at your anus like a bear trying to break through a camper's tent, it's time for Anusol. Anyway, here's this week's edition of the Anusol NBA Lockout Watch (feel free to skip four paragraphs to the next game) …

After wasting nearly the whole summer pointing fingers, leaking stories to reporters and doing everything except getting in a room and negotiating, Billy Hunter's side finally came down a little … and, of course, instead of just agreeing on a better revenue split (right now it's 57/43 for the players, but both sides know it will land somewhere around 51/49), four-year maxes for guaranteed contracts (easily achievable, and absolutely necessary because teams literally can't stop themselves from overpaying players and being crippled by their deals) and a slightly harder salary cap — three moves that would have gotten us 87 percent of the way there — a few of the newer owners (Cleveland's Dan Gilbert and Phoenix's Robert Sarver are the biggies) are now pushing for even more stuff and that's bogging everything down. This faction believes the players' side is crumbling because a few of the biggest NBA agents (Jeff Schwartz, Arn Tellem, etc.) lost faith in Hunter and are investigating the decertification process (which would be THE dumbest thing they could do). These owners don't just want to win this lockout, they want to take a hatchet to 65 years of progress by NBA players … who, by the way, did nothing wrong other than continue to cash in on the ridiculous contracts that owners kept giving them.

Let's take a step back and consider the stupidity of this. Sarver and Gilbert both overpaid for their teams and hope to blow up the system, then create a more favorable one that would cover up the fact that they overpaid for their teams. In Gilbert's case, he coddled LeBron for years, overpaid just about every player on his team (did Daniel Gibson write his deal himself?), showed no roster savvy whatsoever (his front office was really the Bizarro Sam Presti), crippled his own cap season after season, then flipped out when LeBron finally said, "I gotta get out of here, I need to play with better players"5 … and now he blames "the system" for what happened because there are apparently no mirrors in his house. Sarver overpaid for the Suns, realized it about a year later, then spent the next few years pinching pennies … which would have been fine if he didn't have a legitimate chance to win the title from 2005 to 2008 and also in 2010. He's the kind of guy who watched Steve Kerr build a team that came within a couple of breaks of making the 2010 Finals, then offered Kerr a pay cut. His fans hate him; hell, his own players hate him. When I made a few Sarver/Gilbert tweets yesterday, Steve Nash retweeted one of the anti-Sarver tweets.

Why do two owners with CLEAR AGENDAS like Sarver and Gilbert have any input here? It's a great question. The NFL had three of its best and most ruthless owners (Bob Kraft, Jerry Jones and Jerry Richardson) handling its lockout; the NBA has the likes of Sarver, Gilbert, New York's James Dolan and Minnesota's Glen Taylor involved. Have you watched how they run their teams? For god's sake, Taylor just splurged on a coach (Rick Adelman) who told him in no uncertain terms, "I am not answering to your current GM," so instead of firing that GM (David Kahn, the least respected GM in the league by a landslide), Taylor decided, "OK, you don't have to answer to him" AND KEPT BOTH GUYS!!!!!!!! And Dolan is Dolan — he's basically the train from Unstoppable at all times. Why should I expect those four owners to have great insight into solving something as complicated as a labor dispute?

And are we really missing games over this? You should have labor stoppages only because of real issues — like what we had in 1964, when the players nearly sat out the All-Star Game in Boston because they were being treated so badly, or in 1998, when the players were suddenly making so much money that the owners needed a better way to protect themselves. We're not even close to that. I can tell you right now where we're ending up: 51/49 split, four-year max deals, slightly harder cap. So effing get there already. Enough with the posturing. And by the way, both sides could mention the fans once in a while, or show at least a little urgency that they're about to blow all momentum from one of the best seasons in the history of the league. If they think anyone except for die-hard basketball fans will care that there's no NBA in October, November and December — when we'll be focused on the baseball playoffs, the NFL and college football — then they're even more delusional than I thought. I hate everybody in this. Seriously. Both sides make me want to throw up. That was your Anusol NBA Lockout Watch for this week. Back to football.

"It's like dating a woman who hates you so much she will never break up with you, even if you burn down the house every single autumn." ~ Chuck Klosterman on Browns fans relationship with the Browns

Despite Gilbert's strongest attempts to ruin the season for reasons unknown (competitive balance... blah blah blah, a hard cap doesn't do shit except blow up OKC, Memphis, Portland and Dallas while handing LBJ and Wade the title year after year) it looks like the owners told him and Sarver to fuck off and we may start on time:

I thought the best part was the richest players in the league saying they're willing to risk losing the season too. That's going to play just as well with the rank and file as Lebron endorsing contraction. I wonder what Billy Hunter's bar tab looked like last night.

OK, that and letting Sarver take point, and then he starts talking about his wife's handbag. Its all so surreal.

"The fucking Who...... If I want to watch old people run around ill go set fire to a nursing home." - CDT

The way the owners "won" the '98 lockout was by forcing the superstars to take on max contract allotments and in effect subsidize the lower caliber players. Every superstar in the NBA is vastly underpaid and every meh player is overpaid in terms of salary v. revenue generation.

That is why before Tuesday's meeting, the meeting where we came w/in inches of this whole fucking absurdity ending, we had KG rallying the troops to not break.

EOD: when you look at gross revenues the NFL players get the biggest cut, then you have the NHL, then the NBA, then the MLB. The owners are trying to take that 3rd place cut of gross revenue and shove it down to MLB-esque levels in a sport where w/out 15 guys you have 1/2 the revenue.

But everyone in Cleveland wants to scream about parity in a league where it isn't possible and ride Gilbert's little cock to a title that isn't going to be handed to them by some magic systemic change. Gilbert fed this city the HardCap lie after he milked millions upon millions out of LBJ because of no hard cap, got his casinos out of it, pretended for two weeks to care about it and dropped it as soon as uncle Stern told him too because no one in the NBA actually gives a fuck what he says (his big ally was STARVER).

My problem has nothing to do w/ what you mentioned, it has to do w/ people acting like the NBA can be their shitty NFL and acting like Gilbert is some deity.

EOD: this is a money game, nothing else but I can reread 200K words written in here about the unfair league and the necessary lockout so Cleveland can win a title when the team had LBJ, 3 top ten picks, Boozer, 2+ max FAs worth of money and blew it all. That was a title on a silver platter and the organization blew it. The system in place gave the city the shot.

Then again I can do the same in the MLB forum.

Maybe if the shitty Browns stop sucking ass people will STFU about the other sports.

Next up: my rant about how a hard cap would have broken up Portland, OKC, Dallas and Memphis while keeping the Heat together.

e0y2e3 wrote:Gilbert fed this city the HardCap lie after he milked millions upon millions out of LBJ because of no hard cap, got his casinos out of it, pretended for two weeks to care about it and dropped it as soon as uncle Stern told him too because no one in the NBA actually gives a fuck what he says (his big ally was STARVER).

EOD: this is a money game, nothing else but I can reread 200K words written in here about the unfair league and the necessary lockout so Cleveland can win a title when the team had LBJ, 3 top ten picks, Boozer, 2+ max FAs worth of money and blew it all. That was a title on a silver platter and the organization blew it. The system in place gave the city the shot.

All true.

The problem is that over the span from July 2010 to February 2011, there's the glaring perception that the system blew up in the lesser markets faces. That FA money ain't worth shit if you aren't in an upscale city, and you better hope you hit the Duncan/Durant lotto on that draft pick and get a guy who wants to stick around.

And no, they didn't need a hard cap. Putting a bullet in sign 'n trades and the mid-level looks like it will be a help. Will it actually? Can't tell until the rubber hits the pavement.

If all this sturm und drang did was just move the BRI seven points in the owners' favor, however, then the whole show is deader to me than Fredo Corleone.

"The fucking Who...... If I want to watch old people run around ill go set fire to a nursing home." - CDT

FWIW: four different reporters have Gilbert and Sarver as the guys that set the negotiations back a week by screaming about a hard cap (which is in reality about making more money, because they don't want to pay if they get a great team and want an excuse).

Beyond that I agree w/ you. S&Ts have to be drastically changed if not eliminated and the MLE needs the same. I've been preaching that since two years ago.

(aside from your, The League Somehow Became Ruined because the Jazz sold high on D-Will for a rebuild, and LBJ is a cunt (I'll give you Melo, I have no answer for him)

BTW: every point is $40MM, you still watch the NFL, you know, those guys who quibbled over far more money for no real reason? They actually have a real revenue sharing system in place now, that is beyond huge and didn't previously exist. Frankly it is "WE SHOULD ALL SHOUT FOR JOY" huge.

e0y2e3 wrote:EOD: this is a money game, nothing else but I can reread 200K words written in here about the unfair league and the necessary lockout so Cleveland can win a title when the team had LBJ, 3 top ten picks, Boozer, 2+ max FAs worth of money and blew it all. That was a title on a silver platter and the organization blew it. The system in place gave the city the shot.

Then again I can do the same in the MLB forum.

Believe me, I hear that. Shit, I'm part of it. I will say that the older I get and the farther from here I look for thoughts, opinions, analysis and entertainment, the more I lean to this line of thought and understand it.

It is what you say in large part and it ain't changing. Just not sure it's the fault of those in the middle/non glamour markets that they complain about it every day and hate it. Human nature being what it is and all.

Know what really annoys me about the whole thing? People hate 'the system' because it's not changing. Yet people hate and react horribly to change. It's people that are killing me. Not just here though. It's effing universal.

I'm one of those naive casual NBA fans and I have to say that I find it hard to identify and sympathize with the players or the owners. I also couldn't give a shit less about whether the split is 50/50, 40/60, 60/40 and am fine with letting those 2 groups negotiate the right level for the revenue sharing.

For me all I care about his having a reasonably balanced system where there is a pretty firm salary ceiling and a hard floor plus a franchise tag. Probably too idealistic but I would like some reaonable balance where the best run organizations are rewarded. I don't want teams like the Knicks or Heat to have built in bias just because they have tbe best weather or largest media market. On the other side, poorly run teams shouldn't be given great subsidies or extra resources just too balance the league. It a damn difficult situation but it's in the players, owners and fans best interest to find a reasonable compromise. Problem is there is just too much emotion, ego and personal agenda that is getting in the way.

I can't wait to see what happens when Magic leaves this for a more lucrative sponsorship detail

Swerb wrote:Go start a blog if you want to tell the world your incomprehendible ramblings.

Cerebral_DownTime wrote:I have a big arm and can throw the ball pretty damn far...... maybe even over those moutains. The Browns should sign me, i'll let you all in locker room to drink beer. Then we can all go out the parking lot to watch me do motorcycle stunts.

YahooFanChicago wrote:I'm one of those naive casual NBA fans and I have to say that I find it hard to identify and sympathize with the players or the owners. I also couldn't give a shit less about whether the split is 50/50, 40/60, 60/40 and am fine with letting those 2 groups negotiate the right level for the revenue sharing.

For me all I care about his having a reasonably balanced system where there is a pretty firm salary ceiling and a hard floor plus a franchise tag. Probably too idealistic but I would like some reaonable balance where the best run organizations are rewarded. I don't want teams like the Knicks or Heat to have built in bias just because they have tbe best weather or largest media market. On the other side, poorly run teams shouldn't be given great subsidies or extra resources just too balance the league. It a damn difficult situation but it's in the players, owners and fans best interest to find a reasonable compromise. Problem is there is just too much emotion, ego and personal agenda that is getting in the way.

I get that. And I want to agree with you about the cap. But I don't know how a cap is going to prevent the best players from wanting to play in the largest markets.

Mother--are you baiting me on this post just so Lee can go absolutely ape shit nuts?? If so, I'll be your Huckleberry since I do enjoy a good Lee cuss-filled tirade.

I am a very casual NBA fan (more of a college football and baseball fan). I know just enough about this NBA situation to be dangerous.

The star players are going to want to play where they want to play (probably NY, Miami, LA, & Chicago) and obviously you can't stop them from wanting that. You are also right that a hard cap is probably only a partial fix. Having a hard cap and franchise tag would probably keep the exact LBJ situation from happening. But I have been boldly informed that isn't even a negotiation topic between owners and players. Also, though it would prevent the specific LBJ situation from playing out the way it did it couldn't prevent a Carmello-like situation (complaining, dogging it, or whatever. to force the team's hand in a trade).

Those changes though would make it very hard to assemble a team the way Miami did or for NY to accomplish the same.

The worst thing to me is that this situation really is just all about the short-term money and definitely not about making the game better, balancing the field or increasing the total revenue. It's only about the 2 sides getting the biggest share of the pie they can.

when you're a fan of any of these teams you're without a doubt invest a lot of time and energy into jealousy, hatred and self-loathing as a sports fan. Would people really hate Ben Roethlisberger if the guy's career matched Alex Smith up until this point? nope. Would people give a shit about LeQuit bailing on the city had one of the teams finally delivered? I don't think so. To be fair as well, the area did help create that monster.

As a city, I think having a championship winning team would have taken out a lot of those feelings.

I recall of all people (and perhaps a bad example to use about the above qualities I listed), that Scott Raab went on about the amount of Civic Pride the titles by the Steelers and Penguins brought the city of Pitt and NW Pa. as a whole after winning. Being in that situation is almost like a showcase for the positive of the city at the time. It's why you hear people like Peter King spin yarns about people being pittsburgh-ish, when we know he's full of shit.

The city has been beat down for so long that people just seem to have it instilled into their blood to respond with a resounding "FUCK YOU" instead of actually trying to do something. It's tiring repeating that cycle to the point where I'm debating apathy would be better over some form of passion.

Swerb wrote:Go start a blog if you want to tell the world your incomprehendible ramblings.

Cerebral_DownTime wrote:I have a big arm and can throw the ball pretty damn far...... maybe even over those moutains. The Browns should sign me, i'll let you all in locker room to drink beer. Then we can all go out the parking lot to watch me do motorcycle stunts.

"A few less lazy swings""more substance next time""a firm B- for a first time"

Pretty much damning praise in spite of the B- no?

I'm not a good writer and the piece was thought provoking so I would have marked it higher. Then again EYO/Lee is a rough critic so if you want to pat him on the back while giving him an "honest" kick in the balls be my guest...